The Treaty of Portsmouth and Its Legacies (review)

This slim (249-page) volume is a welcome addition to the scholarship of diplomatic history. While its editors make no pretensions of path-breaking revelations, they have brought us a very readable collection of essays from a polyglot group of specialists on this important and timely topic. The book is properly a conference volume, but it suffers from none of the usual problems of that genre. It is very well organized, topical, and well focused. It is much to the credit of the editors that they have succeeded in concentrating our minds on the topic at hand.

Steven Ericson and Allen Hockley have carefully edited ten essays that are the result of a 2005 conference held at Dartmouth College on “Portsmouth and Its Legacies: Commemorating the Centennial of the Russo-Japanese Peace Treaty of 1905.” In addition to the anniversary of the treaty, it also marked 60 years since the Russian occupation of the Kurile Islands at the end of World War II as well as the 150th anniversary of the first treaty of amity between the two nations (1855).

The conference was organized in four round tables, one each on the Russo-Japanese War, the making of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty, the cultural and political legacies of the settlement, and the implications of the treaty for current political and economic issues. Each session was centered around a pair of commissioned essays that had been circulated among the participants prior to the conference. After the round-table discussions, the conference concluded with a two-part plenum panel. The first part of that panel focused on international cooperation on health issues in the Russian Far East; the latter panel focused on the relevance of the Portsmouth Treaty for Asia-Pacific relations today. The editors have organized the essays into three areas of interest: diplomacy and peace, legacies of the treaty, and contemporary implications. The book concludes with an interesting summary of conference discussions as an appendix.

To my mind, the first section is by far the most interesting, but I should present two a priori caveats: I am by avocation a diplomatic historian, and I am far from totally unbiased (I know two of the contributors well). Those prejudices aside, I believe the other two sections are well worthwhile reading but suffer in comparison to the first.

The two most neatly paired essays are those by David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Yasutoshi Teramoto. The former limns “Russia’s Relations with Japan Before and After the War: An Episode in the Diplomacy of Imperialism” while Teramoto examines “Japanese Diplomacy Before and After the War: The Turning Point on the Road to the Pacific War.” As such, the essays are mirror images of the same diplomatic question: what went wrong? They present twin slippery slopes as they examine the proto-empires running pell-mell into each other despite obvious (at least for the historian) reasons why cooperation would have served the two nations infinitely better than did war. Indeed, section 2 on the legacies of the war and treaty demonstrate that postwar cooperation between Russia and Japan came almost naturally and by default. There are no real earthshaking revelations in these essays, but they are well crafted, clearly delineated, and may be fruitfully assigned to undergraduate students as models of good diplomatic history.

“The Portsmouth Peace” by I. V. Lukoianov can be paired with Shinji Yokote’s “Political Legacies of the Portsmouth Treaty” in section 2. These take opposite approaches to the treaty by employing extensive Russian-and Japanese-language sources. Again, there is little new information here, but both are excellent summaries of the topics. Lukoianov reconstructs the political and personal machinations of the Russian principals in the run up to the peace treaty. Yokote recounts the aftermath in Japan which Bruce Menning and John Steinberg provide for Russia in their essay “Lessons Lessened: The Near-Term Military Legacy of 1904–5 in Imperial Russia.”

Eugene Trani and Donald...